AMD to drop ATI brand

AMD said today that ATI graphics cards are soon to become a thing of the past.

“The timing is right as far as we’re concerned,” an AMD spokesman told The Register, saying that the company’s brand strategy is moving to a “customer-centric approach” and away from processer-centric branding.

According to that report, AMD’s Radeon and FirePro brands will remain, but will be transitioned to the AMD brand when the next-generation Radeon GPUs appear later this year.

Research has shown AMD that its own brand is stronger than the ATI brand.

A company release explained that the survey, which polled “several thousand ‘discrete graphics aware’ respondents” in the US, UK, Germany, China, Japan, Brazil, and Russia discovered that the AMD brand was stronger than ATI’s when compared with other graphics competitors.

AMD is preparing to launch its Fusion line of APUs — accelerated processing units — which include CPU, GPU, and other circuitry in the same product.